“Get over it,” she said, and smiled at him. “So is that why you’re here? To tell me that you and Frankenstein are reconciled?”

“Yes,” he said. “No. I don’t know.”

“Spit it out, Jamie,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

“Frankenstein came to see me because we might not make it back from France,” he said. “And he said he didn’t want anything left unsaid.”

“OK,” said Larissa. “That makes sense.”

“I thought so,” he said. “So I went straight down to see my mum, like I should have done three days ago.”

“Good.”

“It just made me think,” he said. “About all the things I haven’t said to people because there wasn’t a right time, or because I just assumed they knew. I don’t want to leave things like that with you.”

She tilted her head to one side. “All right,” she said. “But if you’re—”

“I loved you,” he said, interrupting her. “I really did. I’m sorry if I gave you reason to doubt that, and I’ll never be able to apologise enough for how it ended between us, but I want you to know that I really did love you.”

She stared at him for a long moment, until a small, delicate smile appeared on her face. “I know that, stupid,” she said. “I loved you too. I still do. You mean the world to me.”

Jamie felt his chest constrict. “You still love me?”

She narrowed her eyes, but her smile remained in place. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said. “Things are different now. But yes, I still love you.”

“Things are different now?” he asked. “Or they’re just different?”

“I don’t know,” said Larissa. “Why don’t we just focus on trying to survive today and worry about that later?”

“Fair enough,” he said, slightly more encouraged than he had expected to be as he planned the conversation in his head on his way up from the cellblock. “Do you think we’re going to make it? I don’t mean just us. Do you think anyone is coming back from France?”

“I want to.”

“But you don’t?”

“No,” she said, her voice low. “I don’t think so. What about you?”

“I think we’ll be dead before the end of the day,” he said, and forced a small smile. “I think we’ve left it too late.”

“We might as well not go, then,” said Larissa. “Let’s just tell Paul we don’t think we should bother.”

“Good idea,” said Jamie. “Let’s do it now. I’ll be right behind you.”

Larissa made as if to get up, then shuffled back across the bed so her back was against the wall. Jamie laughed, and shook his head.

“Coward,” he said.

She grinned, and stuck her tongue out at him.

“Charming,” he said.

“I aim to please,” she said. “So let’s say we’re wrong. Let’s say everything goes to plan and we’re back here tomorrow morning with Dracula dead and everyone safe. What are you going to do then?”

Jamie shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “You’ll go back to America, right?”

“I will,” she said. “Maybe not tomorrow, but yeah. Haven is my home.”

I could come with you, he thought. We could start again, away from everyone and everything. We could have a clean slate.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “The place you made.”

“Not now,” said Larissa. “Maybe later. If there is one.”

Jamie nodded. “What about Kate and Matt? What do you think they’ll do?”

“If we win?” said Larissa.

“Yeah.”

“And if Kate survives?”

Jamie grimaced. “Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” said Larissa. “Kate could do whatever she wants. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” said Jamie, firmly. “I do.”

“The same goes for Matt,” said Larissa. “He’s not built for this place, no matter how hard he worked to get here. The Lazarus Project, sure, but not the Department. Not in the long term. I’d have thought it’s only a matter of time until him and Natalia go to Oxford or Cambridge and work on black holes or cure cancer and have a bunch of genius kids.”

“He wants to go to university,” said Jamie. “I know he does. Natalia has already been, crazily enough, but I know Matt was looking forward to it before all this happened. It was going to be his escape from a life he didn’t like.”

“Then I hope he goes,” said Larissa. “And given that he was instrumental in the biggest scientific breakthrough in living memory, I don’t think he’ll have a lot of trouble getting in wherever he wants.”

Jamie smiled. “You don’t think he’s going to need the right predicted grades?”

“I suspect not,” she said, and grinned at him.

Jamie could see it clearly: Matt surrounded by eager students, teaching them something he would never understand in a million years before going home to Natalia and a house full of books and ideas and conversation. It was a happy vision, a future that seemed so essentially right that it would be a crime if it did not come to pass, and it filled Jamie with sudden, fervent determination.

We won’t lose, he told himself. We won’t let it end today. Not if I have anything to do with it.

“What time is it?” asked Larissa.

Jamie cleared his mind and checked his watch. “Nine twenty-seven.”

“Ninety-three minutes until we’re due in the hangar,” she said. “What are we going to do between now and then?”

“I can think of something,” said Jamie.

Larissa’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t make me punch you, Jamie.”

“Breakfast,” he said, rolling his eyes and smiling at her. “I was talking about breakfast. You need to drag your mind out of the gutter.”

She smiled at him. “Don’t make me punch you hard, Jamie.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Breakfast?”

She hopped up off the bed. “Breakfast,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The helicopters flew south-east like a swarm of hornets, rattling and buzzing and bristling with threat.

There were eight of them, six big AgustaWestland Merlins and two super-heavy transports that had been built especially for Blacklight from prototypes that the RAF had decided not to put into production; inside their holds they carried the Department’s entire active roster, fifty technical and support staff, six jeeps, two armoured cars, and more than twenty crates of weaponry and equipment.

Paul Turner sat in the cockpit of the lead helicopter, his face impassive as ever, his gaze fixed on the bright horizon. He had spoken to Bob Allen before he ordered his men and women to load up, and had been pleased to hear both that the Chinese had arrived overnight and the clear incredulity in the NS9 Director’s voice as he described the scene that was waiting for them outside Carcassonne.

More than three thousand Operators. A hundred aircraft, two hundred ground vehicles. A base camp covering four square miles.

An army readying itself for war.

“We should be over the Channel in ninety seconds, sir,” said the pilot sitting beside Turner. “ETA forty-seven minutes.”

It’s almost time, he thought. One way or the other, we settle this today.

Eight storeys beneath the wide grounds of the Loop, Marie Carpenter sat on the edge of her sofa, trying to convince her racing heart to slow down.

She had told her son the truth; she understood he had to go, and she really, really didn’t blame him for doing so. She was so proud of Jamie that it was physically painful; it was a constant vibration of her insides, relentless waves of pride shot through with terror as her brain tormented her with visions of the hundreds of ways he could be hurt, or worse.

The long cellblock was now empty apart from her and the Operator who had been left behind to man the guard post by the entrance. There had been an influx of vampires into the cells in recent weeks as men and women waited to be given the cure, although few of them had stayed for more than twenty-four hours, forty-eight at most, before they were gone. For the last few days, since she had been discharged from the infirmary and the Department had shifted its attention entirely to what was happening in France, it had been just her and Valentin, but now he was gone too.